Freud Notes from his Standard Edition

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1 Freud Notes from his Standard Edition Sigmund Freud The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Trans. James Strachey The Hogarth Press London 1960 ed. May these quotes be the spark for your further research! Volume 1 or 2 or 3: No quotes Volume 4: The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 4: 256) "The obscure information which is brought to us by mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human ages of human society gives an unpleasing picture of the father's despotic power and of the ruthlessness with which he made use of it. Kronos devoured his children, just as the wild boar devours the sow's litter; while Zeus emasculated his father 2 and made himself ruler in his place. The more restricted was the rule of the father in the ancient family, the more must the son, as his destined successor, have found himself in the position of an enemy, and the more impatient must he have been to become ruler himself through his father's death. Even in our middle-class families fathers are as a rule inclined to refuse their sons independence and the means necessary to secure it and thus to foster the growth of the germ of hostility which is inherent in their relation." 2 [Footnote added 1909:] Or so he is reported to have done according to some myths. According to others, emasculation was only carried out by Kronos on his father Uranus. [This passage is discussed in Chapter X (3) of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901b). For the mythological significance of this theme, cf. Rank, 1909, [added 1914:] and Rank 1912c, Chapter IX, Section 2. [These sentences in the text are, of course, an early hint at the line of thought developed by Freud in his Totem and Taboo ( ).] Volume 5: The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) (SE 5: 351) "When we have become familiar with the abundant use made of symbolism for representing sexual material in dreams, the question is bound to arise of whether many of these symbols do not occur with a permanently fixed meaning, like the 'grammalogues' in shorthand; and we shall feel tempted to draw up a new 'dream-book' on the decoding principle [see p.97 f.]. On that point there is this to be said: this symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is

2 2 to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams. [1909] (SE 5: 357) "The appearance in dreams of lizards animals whose tails grow again if they are pulled off has the same significance. (Cf. the lizard-dream on p.11 f.) Many of the beasts which are used as genital symbols in mythology and folklore play the same part in dreams: e.g. fishes, snails, cats, mice (on account of the pubic hair), and above all those most important symbols of the male organ snakes. Small animals and vermin represent small children for instance, undesired brothers and sisters." (SE 5: 398 n 1 ) 1 "These myths and interpretations reveal a true psychological insight. I have found that people who know that they are preferred or favored by their mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors." [Refers to dreams like Julius Caesar to have had a dream of sexual intercourse with his mother which was explained by dream-interpreters to a favorable augury for his taking possession of the earth (Mother Earth). Later dream by Brutus, interestingly, is of a similar sort. (SE 5: 401) "In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of the child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this." (SE 5: 619) "The material for them was provided by a recollection from mythology. The sickle was the one with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the picture of the old peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who devoured his children and on whom Zeus took such unfilial vengeance (see pg. 256). (SE 5: 256) "The obscure information which is brought to us by mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human society gives an unpleasing picture of the father's despotic power and of the ruthlessness with which he made use of it. Kronos devoured his children, just as the wild boar devours the sow's litter; while Zeus emasculated his father 2 and made himself ruler in his place. The more restricted was the rule of the father in the ancient family, the more must the son, as his destined successor, have found himself in the position of an enemy, and the more impatient must he have been to become ruler himself through his father's death. Even in our middle-class families fathers are as a rule inclined to refuse their sons independence and the means necessary to secure it and thus to foster the growth of the germ of hostility which is inherent in their relation."

3 3 2 [Footnote added 1901:] O so he is reported to have done according to some myths. According to others, emasculation was only carried out by Kronos on his father Uranus. [This passage is discussed in Chapter X (3) of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901b).] For the mythological significance of this theme, cf. Rank, 1909, [added 1914:] and Rank, 1912c, Chapter IX, Section 2. [These sentences in the text are, of course, an early hint at the line of thought developed later by Freud in his Totem and Taboo ( ).] (SE 5: 633) "When they remembered a dream after waking up, they regarded it as either a favorable or a hostile manifestation by higher powers, demonic and divine. When modes of thought belonging to the natural science begin to flourish, all this ingenious mythology was transformed into psychology, and today only a small minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer's own mind." (SE 5: 685) "Dream-symbolism extends far beyond dreams: it is not peculiar to dreams, but exercises a similar dominating influence on representation in fairy-tales, myths and legends, in jokes and in folk-lore. It enables us to trace the intimate connections between dreams and these latter productions. We must not suppose that dream-symbolism is a creation of the dream-work; it is in all probability a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement and dramatization." 1 1 Further information on dream-symbolism may be found in the works of early writers on dream-interpretation, e.g. Artemidorus of Daldis and Scherner (1861), and also in my own Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) [Chapter VI, Section E], in the mythological studies of the psycho-analytic school, as well as in some of W. Stekel's writings (e.g. 1911). [See further Lecture X (on 'Symbolism in Dreams') in Freud's Introductory Lectures ( ).] Volume 6: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (SE 6: 48) "Thus the 'childhood memories' of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of 'screen memories' and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths. 1 1 [This analogy between the childhood memories of an individual and the myths and legends of a nation relating to its prehistoric past is developed by Freud in Chapter II of his essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1910c), Standard Ed., 11, 83-4, See also below, p. 148.]

4 4 (SE 6: 147-8) "The view developed here, that distressing memories succumb especially easily to motivated forgetting, deserves to find application in many spheres where no attention, or too little, has so far been paid to it. Thus it seems to me that it has still not yet been sufficiently strongly emphasized in assessing testimony in courts of law, 1 where the process of putting a witness on oath is clearly expected to have much too great a purifying influence on the play of his psychical forces. It is universally acknowledged that where the origin of a people's traditions and legendary history are concerned, a motive of this kind, whose aim is to wipe from memory whatever is distressing to national feeling, must be taken into consideration." 1 (Note there are two number 1 footnotes in this paragraph, the first half of the paragraph belongs to page 147; and, the second number 1 footnote belongs to the paragraph continuation on page 148) Page footnote: 1 Cf. Gross (1898). [See footnote, p. 254 below.] Page footnote: 1 [Cf. above, p. 48.] [Note: Page 254, footnote 1 : has nothing on mythology] (SE 6: 107) "In Ruth's work on music phantoms I found at the beginning of the list of contents an announcement of a detailed inductive proof that the ancient Greek myths and legends have heir main source of origin in phantoms of sleep and music, in the phenomena of dreams and also in deliria." (SE 6: 256) "But the partial justification which we concede to paranoia in respect of this view taken by it of chance actions will help us towards a psychological understanding of the sense of conviction that the paranoic attaches to all these interpretations. There is in fact some truth in them 1 ; those, too, of our errors of judgment which are not to be counted as pathological acquire their sense of conviction in just the same way. 1 [The notion of there being a core of truth in paranoic delusions has a long course of development in Freud's writings. It had already appeared, in a rather different form, in the last few paragraphs of his second paper on "The Neuro- Psychoses of Defense" (1896b). Among its later appearance may be mentioned one in the Gradiva essay (1907a), Standard Ed., 9, 80 and another, which seems to follow closely some of the present discussions, in the paper on "Some Neurotic Mechanisms" (1922b), ibid., 18, 226. In Freud's latest writings the idea was extended. Hen now applied the notion of a historical core of truth firstly to myths, in the paper on the origin of fire (1932a), and then to religion, in Moses and Monotheism (1939a), Chapter III, Part I, Section D and Part II, Section G. The subject is also treated, from a more clinical angle, in Section III

5 5 of the paper on "Constructions in Analysis" (1937d). In these later discussions Freud elaborates a distinction between "material" and "historical" truth.] (SE 6: 258) "In point of fact I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition 2 (the endopsychic perception, as it were) 3 of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology. 1 (NOTE: again we have footnotes that change from one page to the next, footnotes 2 and 3 belong to page 258; and, footnote 1 belongs to page A recognition which, of course, has nothing of the character of a [true] recognition. 3 [The words in parenthesis were added in Freud refers to this passage in the theoretical section of the 'Rat Man' case history (1909d), Standard Ed., 10, He had made a similar suggestion under the name of 'endopsychic myths' in a letter to Fliess of December 12, 1897 (Freud, 1950a, Letter 78).] 1 [This was the first published appearance of the word. Freud did not use it again for fourteen years in 'The Unconscious' (1915e), Standard Ed., 14, 181. he had, however, originally introduced it in a letter to Fliess of February 13, 1896 (Freud, 1950a, Letter 41).] Volume 7: A Case of Hysteria; Three Essays on Sexuality; and, Other Works (SE 7: 155) "In other cases the replacement of the object by a fetish is determined by a symbolic connection of thought, of which the person concerned is usually not conscious. It is not always possible to trace the course of these connections with certainty. (The foot, for instance, is an ageold sexual symbol which occurs even in mythology; 1 no doubt the part played by fur as a fetish owes its origin to an association with the hair of the mons Veneris.) 1 [Footnote added 1910:] The shoe or slipper is a corresponding symbol of the female genitals.

6 6 (SE 7: 226n 1 ) "It is in the world of ideas, however, that the choice of an object is accomplished at first; and the sexual life of maturing youth is almost entirely restricted to indulging in fantasies, that is, in ideas that are not destined to be carried into effect. 1 " 1 [Footnote added 1920:] The fantasies of the pubertal period have as their starting-point the infantile sexual researches that were abandoned in childhood. No doubt, too, they are also present before the end of the latency period. They may persist wholly, or to a great extent, unconsciously and for that reason it is often impossible to date them accurately. They are of great importance in the origin of many symptoms, since they precisely constitute preliminary stages of these symptoms and thus lay down the forms in which the repressed libidinal components find satisfaction. In the same, they are the prototypes of the nocturnal fantasies which become conscious as dreams. Dreams are often nothing more than revivals of pubertal fantasies of this kind under the influence of, and in relation to, some stimulus left over from the waking life of the previous day (the 'day's residues'). [See Chapter VII, Section I, of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a); Standard Ed., 5, 492 f.] Some among the sexual fantasies of the pubertal period are especially prominent, and are distinguished by their very general occurrence and by being to a great extent independent of individual experience. Such are the adolescent's fantasies of overhearing his parents in sexual intercourse, of having been seduced at an early age by someone he loves and of having been threatened with castration [cf. the discussion of 'primal fantasies' in Lecture XXIII of Freud's Introductory Lectures ( )]' such, too, are his fantasies of being in the womb, and even of experiences there, and the so-called 'Family Romance', in which he reacts to the difference between his attitude towards his parents now and in his childhood. The close relation existing between these fantasies and myths has been demonstrated in the case of the last instance by Otto Rank (1909). [Cf. also Freud's own paper on 'Family Romances' (1909c) and his long footnote to Section G of Part I of his case history of the 'Rat Man' (1909d).] It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has became more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents. [Added 1924:] In another work (1924), Rank has traced attachment to the mother back to the prehistoric intra-uterine period and has thus indicated the biological foundation of the Oedipus complex. He differs from what has been said above, by deriving the barrier against incest from the traumatic effect

7 7 of anxiety at birth. [See Chapter X of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d).] Volume 8: No quotes Volume 9: Jensen's 'Gradiva' and Other Works (SE 9: 135) "Those who understand how to interpret myths and legends can detect it in the riddle the Theban Sphinx set to Oedipus. [NOTE: 'detect it' refers to the question of the origin of babies] (SE 9: 152) "The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful fantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity. (SE 9: 174) "In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist in the ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, in unconscious thinking, in dreams and in neuroses money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt." (SE 9: 174 n 4 ) 4 Cf. Jeremias (1904, 115n.). ' "Mamon" ("Mammon") is "Manman" in Babylonian and is another name for Nergal, the God of the Underworld. According to Oriental mythology, which has passed over into popular legends and fairy tales, gold is the excrement of Hell.' (SE 9: 211) "A knowledge of infantile sexual theories in the shapes they assume in the thoughts of children can be of interest in various ways even, surprisingly enough, for the elucidation of myths and fairy tales." (SE 9: 212-3) "At the instigation of these feelings and worries, the child now comes to be occupied with the first, grand problem of life and asks himself the question: 'Where do babies come from? 2 a question which, there can be no doubt, first ran: 'Where did this particular, intruding baby come from?' We seem to hear the echoes of this first riddle in innumerable riddles of myth and legend." 2 [See footnote above, [p. 135.] [NOTE: nothing on mythology in this] (SE 9: 217) "Legends and myths testify to the upheaval in the child's emotional life and to the horror which is linked with the castration complex 1 a complex which is subsequently remembered by consciousness with corresponding reluctance."

8 8 1 [The first published appearance of the term is the present one, and not the passage in 'Little Hans', Standard Ed., 10, 8, as is there wrongly suggested in a footnote. The idea of a threat of castration occurs in a single sentence in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). Standard Ed., 5, 619.] (SE 9: 238) "But here the influence of sex is already in evidence, for a boy is far more inclined to feel hostile impulses towards his father than towards his mother and has a far more intense desire to get free from him than from her. In this respect the imagination of girls is apt to show itself much weaker. These consciously remembered mental impulses of childhood embody the factor which enables us to understand the nature of myths." (SE 9: 252) "Psycho-analytic research into the neuroses (the various forms of nervous illness with a mental causation) has endeavored to trace their connection with instinctual life and the restrictions imposed on it by the claims of civilization, with the activities of the normal individual in fantasies and dreams, and with the creations of the popular mind in religion, myths and fairy tales." Volume 10: Two Case Histories (SE 10: 8) "The 'castration complex' has left marked traces behind it in myths (and not only in Greek myths); in a passage in my Interpretation of Dreams [1900a], 1 and elsewhere, I have touched upon the part it plays. 2 " 1 [Within a couple of pages of the end of the book (Standard Ed., 5, 619). The present appears to be Freud's first published use of the term 'castration complex'. The concept had already been discussed by him not only in the passage just referred to in The Interpretation of Dreams but also in his paper on 'The Sexual Theories of Children' (1908c).] 2 (Footnote added 1923:) Since this was written, the study of the castration complex has been further developed in contributions to the subject by Lou Andreas-Salomé [1916], A. Stärche [1910], F. Alexander [1922], and others. It has been urged that every time his mother's breast is withdrawn from a baby he is bound to feel it as castration (that is to say, as the loss of what he regards as an important part of his own body); that, further, he cannot fail to be similarly affected by the regular loss of his feces; and, finally, that the act of birth itself (consisting as it does in the separation of the child from his mother, with whom he has hitherto been united) is the prototype of all castration. While recognizing all of these roots of the complex, I have nevertheless to forward the view that the term 'castration complex' ought to be confined to those excitations and consequences which are bound up with the loss of the penis. Any one who, in analyzing adults, has become convinced of the invariable presence of the castration complex, will of course find difficulty in

9 9 ascribing its origin to a chance threat of a kind which is not, after all, of such universal occurrence; he will be driven to assume that children construct this danger for themselves out of the slightest hints, which will never be wanting. [Cf. Freud's discussion of 'primal fantasies' in Lecture XXIII of his Introductory Lectures ( ) and in Sections V and VIII of his case history of the 'Wolf Man' (1918b). See also below, p. 206 n.] This circumstance is also the motive, indeed, that has stimulated the search for those deeper roots of the complex which are universally forthcoming. But this makes it all the more valuable that in the case of little Hans the threat of castration is reported by his parents themselves, and moreover at a date before there was any question of his phobia. (206n) [NOTE: 'this kind' reference is to 'misdeeds having been of a sexual nature] "In psycho-analyses we frequently come across occurrences of this kind, dating back to the earliest years of the patient's childhood, in which his infantile sexual activity appears to reach its climax and often comes to a catastrophic end owning to some misfortune or punishment. Such occurrences are apt to appear in a shadowy way in dreams. Often they will become so clear that the analyst thinks he has a firm hold of them, and will nevertheless evade any final elucidation; and unless he proceeds with the greatest skill and caution he may be compelled to leave it undecided whether the scene in question actually took place or not. It will help to put us upon the right track in interpreting it, if we recognize that more than one version of the scene (each often differing greatly from the other) may be detected in the patient's unconscious fantasies. If we do not wish to go astray in our judgment of their historical reality, we must above all bear in mind that people's 'childhood memories' are only consolidated at a later period, usually at the age of puberty; and that this involves a complicated process of remodeling, analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about is early history. It at once becomes evident that in his fantasies about his infancy the individual as he grows up endeavors to efface the recollection of his auto-erotic activities; and this he does by exalting their memory-traces to the level of object-love, just as a real historian will view the past in light of the present. This explains why these fantasies abound in seductions and assaults, where the facts will have been confined to auto-erotic activities and the caresses or punishments that stimulated them. Furthermore, it becomes clear that in constructing fantasies about his childhood the individual sexualizes his memories; that it, he brings commonplace experiences into relation with his sexual activity, and extends his sexual interest to them though in doing this he is probably following upon the traces of a really existing connection. No one who remembers my 'Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy' [1909b, p. 101 ff. above] will need to be told that it is not my intention in these remarks to detract from the importance which I have hitherto attached to infantile sexuality by reducing it to nothing more than sexual interest at the age of puberty. I merely wish to give some technical advice that may help to clear up

10 10 a class of fantasy which is calculated to falsify the picture of infantile sexual activity. It is seldom that we are in the fortunate position of being able, as in the present instance, to establish the facts upon which these tales of the individual's prehistoric past are based, by recourse to the unimpeachable testimony of a grown-up person. Even so, the statement made by our patient's mother leaves the way open to various possibilities. That she did not proclaim the sexual character of the offence for which the child was punished may have been due to the activity of her own censorship; for with all parents it is precisely this sexual element in their children's past that their own censorship is most anxious to eliminate. But it is just as possible that the child was reproved by his nurse or by his mother herself for some commonplace piece of naughtiness of a non-sexual nature, and that his reaction was so violent that he was castigated by his father. In fantasies of this kind nurses and servants are regularly replaced by the superior figure of the mother. A deeper interpretation of the patient's dreams in relation to this episode revealed the clearest traces of the presence in his mind of an imaginative production of a positively epic character. In this his sexual desires for his mother and sister and his sister's premature death were linked up with the young hero's chastisement at his father's hand. It was impossible to unravel this tissue of fantasy thread by thread; the therapeutic success of the treatment was precisely what stood in the way of this. The patient recovered, and his ordinary life began to assert its claims: there were many tasks before him, which he had already neglected far too long, and which were incompatible with a continuation of the treatment. I am not to be blamed, therefore, for this gap in analysis. The scientific results of psycho-analysis are at present only a byproduct of its therapeutic aims, and for that reason it is often just in those cases where treatment fails that most discoveries are made. The content of the sexual life of infancy consists in auto-erotic activity on the part of the dominant sexual components, in traces of object-love, and in the formation of that complex which deserves to be called the nuclear complex of the neuroses. It is the complex which comprises the child's earliest impulses, alike tender and hostile, towards its parents and brothers and sister, after its curiosity has been awakened usually by the arrival of a new baby brother or sister. The uniformity of the content of the sexual life of children, together with the unvarying character of the modifying tendencies which are later brought to bear upon it, will easily account for the constant sameness which as a rule characterized the fantasies that are constructed around the period of childhood, irrespective of how greatly or how little real experiences have contributed towards them. It is entirely characteristic of the nuclear complex of infancy that the child's father should be assigned the part of a sexual opponent and of an interferer with auto-erotic sexual activities; and real events are usually to a large extent responsible for bringing this about. [The distinction between childhood memories and childhood fantasies preoccupied Freud throughout his career. See, for instance, his paper on

11 11 'Screen Memories' (1899a) and the discussion on 'primal fantasies referred to in the additional footnote on p. 8 above. His doubts as to the validity of childhood memories go back to 1897 (see his letter to Fliess of September 21, Letter 69 in Freud, 1950a), though his conclusion s on this pot were not published till many years later (Freud, 1906a). On the other hand, in some of his very last writings he insists that there is always a grain of historical truth behind apparently mythological fantasies. See, e.g., Moses and Monotheism (1939a), III, 2, g. The term 'nuclear complex' had already been used by Freud, but in another sense, in his paper on 'The Sexual Theories of children' (1908c). the term 'Oedipus Complex' seems to have been fist used by him in his published writing a little later, in the first of his 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love' (1910h).] (SE 10: 9) "Animals owe a great deal of their importance in myths and fairy tales to the openness with which they display their genitals and their sexual functions to the inquisitive little human child." (SE 10: 70n) 1 The box was of course the womb. (Hans's father was trying to let him know that he understood this.) And the same is true of the caskets in which so many of the heroes of mythology were exposed, from the time of King Sargon of Agade onwards. (Added 1923:) Cf. Rank's study, Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden, (SE 10: 98n) 1 Perhaps, too, the word 'borer' ['Bohrer'] was not chosen without regard for its connection with 'born' ['geboren'] and 'birth' ['Geburt]. If so, the child could have made no distinction between 'bored' ['gebohrt'] and 'born' ['geboren']. I accept this suggestion, made by an experienced fellow-worker, but I am not in a position to say whether we have before us here a deep and universal connection between the two ideas or merely the employment of a verbal coincidence peculiar to German [and English]. Prometheus (Pramantha), the creator of man, is also etymologically 'the borer'. (Cf. Abraham, Traum und Mythus, 1909.) Volume 11: Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; Leonardo da Vinci; and, Other Works (SE 11: 36) "I should like you to notice, too, that the analysis of dreams has shown us that the unconscious makes use of a particular symbolism, especially for representing sexual complexes. This symbolism varies partly from individual to individual; but partly it is laid down in a typical form and seems to coincide with the symbolism which, as we suspect, underlies our myths and fairy tales. It seems not impossible that these creations of the popular mind might find an explanation through the help of dreams."

12 12 (SE 11: 47) "The myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife, reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish, which is later opposed and repudiated by the barrier against incest. Shakespeare's Hamlet is equally rooted in the soil of the incest-complex, but under a better disguise. 1 1 [Freud adopted the term 'Oedipus complex' for the first time shortly after these lectures were delivered, in the first of his 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love' (1910h). See below, p. 171n 1. 1 (171n 1 ] [This appears to be Freud's first published use of the actual term. The concept had, of course, long been familiar to him (cf. Standard Ed., 4, 263n), and he had already spoken of the 'nuclear complex', e.g. in the paper referred to in the last footnote [sexual theories of children (1908c)] and in his 'Five Lectures', 1910a, above, p. 47.] (SE 11: 62) [Editor's NOTE: this quote refers to questioning Freud's conclusion earlier in this paragraph that Leonardo da Vinci's 's bird fantasy (vulture) stood for his mother cannot receive support from Egyptian mythology]. "The fantasy and the myth seem to have no immediate connection with each other. Nevertheless each of them, taken independently, raises an interesting problem. How was it that the ancient Egyptians came to link up the ideas of 'vulture' and 'mother'? Does the Egyptologist's explanation that it is merely a matter of chance phonetic coincidence meet the questioned? If not, Freud's discussion of androgynous mother-goddess must have a value of its own, irrespective of its connection with the case of Leonardo." (SE 11: 78-9) "Researchers are directed to the question of where babies come from, exactly as if the child were looking for ways and means to avert so undesired an event. In this way we have been astonished to learn that children refuse to believe the bits of information that are given them for example that they energetically reject the fable of the stork with its wealth of mythological meaning, that they date their intellectual independence from this act of disbelief, and that they often feel in serious opposition to adults and in fact never afterwards forgive them for having deceived them here about the true facts of the case." (SE 11: 94) "Mythology can teach us that an androgynous structure, a combination of male and female sex characters, was an attribute not only of Mut but also of other deities like Isis and Hathor thought perhaps of these only in so far as they too had a maternal nature and became amalgamated with Mut (Römer, 1903). It teaches us further that other Egyptian deities, like Neith of Sais from whom the Greek Athene was later derived were originally conceived of as androgynous, i.e. as hermaphrodite, and that the same was true of many of the Greek gods, especially of those associated with Dionysus,

13 13 but also of Aphrodite, who was later restricted to the role of a female goddess of love. Mythology may then offer the explanation that the addition of a phallus to the female body is intended to denote the primal creative force of nature, and that all these hermaphrodite divinities are expressions of the idea that only a combination of male and female elements can give a worthy representation of divine perfection. But none of these considerations gives us an explanation of the puzzling psychological fact that the human imagination does not boggle at endowing a figure which is intended to embody the essence of the mother with the mark of male potency which is the opposite of everything maternal." (SE 11: 97-8) "The child's assumption that his mother has a penis is thus the common source from which are derived the androgynously-formed mother goddesses such as the Egyptian Mut and the vulture's 'coda' in Leonardo's childhood fantasy. It is in fact only due to a misunderstanding that we describe these representations of gods as hermaphrodite in the medical sense of the word. In none of them is there a combination of the true genitals of both sexes a combination which to the abhorrence of all beholders, is found in some cases of malformation; all that has happened is that the male organ has been added to the breasts which are the mark of a mother, just as it was present in the child's first idea of his mother's body. This form of the mother's body, the revered creation of primeval fantasy, has been preserved for the faithful by mythology." (SE 11: 217) "The beautiful legend of Lady Godiva tells how all the town's inhabitants hid behind their shuttered windows, so as to make easier the lady's task of riding naked through the streets in broad daylight, and how the only man who peeped through the shutters at her reveal loveliness was punished by going blind. Nor is this the only example which suggests that neurotic illness holds the hidden key to mythology as well." (SE 11: 234) "It would carry me too far afield if I were to bring forward instances here in proof of this thesis, but I can assert that they outcome of such an examination of the evidence is that the jokes, both erotic and of other sorts, which are in popular circulation provide an excellent auxiliary means of investigating the unconscious human mind in the same way as do dreams, myths and legends, with the exploitation of which psycho-analysis is already actively engaged." Volume 12: The Case of Schreber; Papers on Technique; and, Other Works (SE 12: 50 n 2 ) 2 [NOTE: 'the same process' = delusions regarding god, and the self into divisions of two personalities: 'upper' and 'lower', 'god self' and 'self': resolving into 'decomposition'. "All of this dividing up of Flechsig and God into a number of persons thus had the same meaning as the splitting of the

14 14 persecutor into Flechsig and God. They were all duplications of one and the same important relationship. 2 " 2 Otto Rank (1909) has found the same process at work in the formation of myths. (SE 12: 54) "The sun, therefore, is nothing but another sublimated symbol for the father; and in pointing this out I must disclaim all responsibility for the monotony of the solutions provided by psycho-analysis. In this instance symbolism overrides grammatical gender at least so far as German goes, 3 for in most other languages the sun is masculine. Its counterpart in this picture of the two parents in 'Mother Earth' as she is generally called. We frequently come upon confirmations of this assertion in resolving the pathogenic fantasies of neurotics by psycho-analysis. I can make no more than the barest allusion to the relation of all this to cosmic myths." 3 [The German word for 'sun' is feminine: 'die Sonne'.] (SE 12: 210) "The psycho-analytic method of investigation can accordingly be applied equally to the explanation of normal psychical phenomena, and has made it possible to discover the close relationship between pathological psychical products and normal structures such as dreams, the small blunders of everyday life, and such valuable phenomena as jokes, myths and imaginative works." (SE 12: 223) "A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path as assured pleasure at a later time. But the endopsychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is reflected in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in the after-life for the voluntary or enforced renunciation of earthly pleasure is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind." [NOTE: reference is to the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle] Volume 13: Totem and Taboo; and, Other Works (SE 13: 1) "Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind, through the information about his art, his religion and his attitude towards life which has come to us either directly or by way of tradition handed down in legends, myths and fairy tales, and through the relics of his mode of thought which survive in our own manners and customs." (SE 13: 25) "But how did this split take place? Through the transplanting, so Wundt tells us, of the taboo ordinances from the sphere of demons into the

15 15 sphere of belief in gods. [Ibid., 311] The contrast between 'sacred' and 'unclean' coincides with a succession of two stages of mythology." [NOTE: reference is to a split into veneration and horror as in touching a magic object being used unlawfully, with consequence spell over person. (further note: p. 20: "The source of taboo is attributed to a peculiar magical power which is inherent in persons and spirits and can be conveyed by them through the medium of inanimate objects."] (SE 13: 51) "The question of why the emotional attitude towards rulers includes such a powerful unconscious element of hostility raises a very interesting problem, but one that lies outside the limits of the present study. I have already hinted at the fact that the child's complex of emotions towards his father has a bearing on the subject, and I may add that more information on the early history of the kingship would throw a decisive light on it. Frazer (1911a) has put forward impressive reasons, though, as he himself admits, not wholly conclusive ones, for supposing that the earliest kings were foreigners who, after a brief reign, were sacrificed with solemn festivities as representative of the deity. It is possible that the course taken by the evolution of kings may also have had an influence upon the myths of Christendom." (SE 13: 65) "Wundt (1906, 129) remarks that 'among the activities attributed by myths all over the world to demons, the harmful predominate, so that in popular belief bad demons are clearly older than good ones'. It is quite possible that the whole concept of demons was derived from the important relation of the living to the dead. The ambivalence inherent in that relation was expressed in the subsequent course of human development by the fact that, from the same root, it gave rise to two completely opposed psychical structures: on the one hand fear of demons and ghosts and on the other hand veneration of ancestors. 3 The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of these who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of the belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors' memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help." 3 In the course of psycho-analysis of neurotics who suffer (or who suffered in their childhood) from fear of ghosts, it is often possible to show without much difficulty that the ghosts are disguises for the patients' parents. Cf. in this connection a paper upon 'Sexual Ghosts' by Haeberlin (1912). Here the person concerned was not the subject's parent (who was dead) but someone else of erotic significance to him. T.T. XIII F

16 16 (SE 13: 106) "In his Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, Wundt (1912, 116 ff.) writes as follows: 'The totem animal is also usually regarded as the ancestral animal of the group in question. "Totem" is, on the one hand, a group name, and, on the other, a name indicative of ancestry. In the latter connection it has also mythological significance." (SE 13: 148) "In myths the god often transforms himself into an animal, and frequently into the animal that is sacred to him." (SE 13: 150) "As time went on, the animal lost its sacred character and the sacrifice lost its connection with the totem feast; it became a simple offering to the deity, an act of renunciation in favor of the god. "It was God Himself who demanded it and regulated it. This is the phase in which we find myths showing the god himself killing the animal which is sacred to him and which is in fact himself." (SE 13: 152) "The son's efforts to put himself in the place of the father-god became ever more obvious. The introduction of agriculture increased the son's importance in the patriarchal family. He ventured upon new demonstrations of his incestuous libido, which found symbolic satisfaction in his cultivation of Mother Earth. Divine figures such as Attis, Adonis and Tammuz emerged, spirits of vegetation and at the same time youthful divinities enjoying the favors of mother goddesses and committing incest with their mother in defiance of their father. But the sense of guilt, which was not allayed by these creations, found expression in myths which granted only short lives to these youthful favorites of the mother-goddesses and decreed their punishment by emasculation or by the wrath of the father in the form of an animal. Adonis was killed by a wild boar, the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, beloved of Cybele, perished by castration. 1 The mourning for these gods and the rejoicings over their resurrection passes over into the ritual of another sondeity who was destined to lasting success." 1 Fear of castration plays an extremely large part, in the case of the youthful neurotics whom we come across, as interference in their relations with their father. The illuminating instance reported by Ferenczi (1913a) has shown us how a little boy took as his totem the beast that had pecked at his little penis. When our [Jewish] children come to hear of ritual circumcision, they equate it with castration. The parallel in social psychology to this reaction by children has not yet been worked out, so far as I am aware. In primeval times and in primitive races, where circumcision is so frequent, it is performed at the age of initiation into manhood and it is at that age that its significance is to be found; it was only as a secondary development that it was shifted back to the early years of life. It is of very great interest to find that among primitive peoples circumcision is combined with cutting the hair and knocking out teeth or is

17 17 replaced by them, and that our children, who cannot possibly have any knowledge of this, in fact treat these two operations, in the anxiety with which they react to them, as equivalents of castration. (SE 13: 154) "There can be o doubt that in the Christian myth the original sin was one against God the Father. If, however, Christ redeemed mankind from the burden of original sin by the sacrifice of his own life, we are driven to conclude that the sin was a murder. The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to bloodguilt. 1 And if this sacrifice of a life brought about atonement with God the Father, the crime to be expiated can only have been the murder of the father." 1 We find that impulses to suicide in a neurotic turn out regularly to be selfpunishments for wishes for someone else's death. (SE 13: 185) "In the first place, it seems quite possible to apply the psychoanalytic views derived from dreams to products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy tales. 1 The need to interpret such productions has long been felt; some 'secret meaning' has been suspected to lie behind them and it has been presumed that that meaning is concealed by changes and transformations. The study made by psycho-analysis of dreams and neuroses has given it the necessary experience to enable it to guess the technical procedures that have governed these distortions. But in a number of instances it can also reveal the hidden motives which have led to this modification in the original meaning of myths. It cannot accept as the first impulse to the construction of myths a theoretical craving for finding an explanation of natural phenomena or fore accounting for cult observances and usages which have become unintelligible. It looks for that impulse in the same psychical 'complexes', in the same emotional trends, which it has discovered at the base of dreams and symptoms." 1 Cf. Abraham, Rank and Jung. (SE 13: 186) "Myths, religion and morality find their place in this scheme as attempts to seek a compensation for the lack of satisfaction of human wishes." [NOTE: 'this scheme' relates to: attempts to deny whatever might disturb this feeling of omnipotence [primitive people's childish belief in its own omnipotence 1 ] and so to prevent emotional life from being affected by reality until the latter could be better controlled and used for purposes of satisfaction. 1 Cf. Ferenczi (1913c) and Freud ( ), Chapter III [above p. 85 ff.]. (SE 13: 77) "The human race, if we are to follow the authorities, have in the course of ages developed three such systems of thought three great pictures

18 18 of the universe: animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific. Of these, animism, the first to be created, is perhaps the one which is most consistent and exhaustive and which gives a truly complete explanation of the nature of the universe." (SE 13: 80) "From the vast number of magical acts having a similar basis I will only draw attention to two more, which have played a large part among primitive peoples of every age and which persist to some degree in the myths and cults of higher stages of civilization that is, rituals for producing rain and fertility." (SE 13: 68) "This same characteristic is to be seen in the savage's attitude towards taboo. It is a command issued by conscience; any violation of it produces a fearful sense of guilt which follows as a matter of course and of which the origin unknown. 2 " 2 The sense of guilt in the case of taboos is not in the least diminished if the violation occurs unwittingly. (Cf. the instances above [p.42f.].) An interesting parallel is found in Greek mythology: the guilt of Oedipus was not palliated by the fact that he incurred it without his knowledge and even against his intention. (SE 13: 243) "Of all the imagos of a childhood which, as a rule, is no longer remembered, none is more important for a youth or a man than that of his father. Organic necessity introduces into a man's relation to his father an emotional ambivalence which we have found most strikingly expressed in the Greek myth of King Oedipus. A little boy is bound to love and admire his father, who seems to him the most powerful, the kindest and the wisest creature in the world. God himself is after all only an exaltation of this picture of a father as he is represented in the mind of early childhood. But soon the other side of this emotional relationship emerges. One's father is recognized as the paramount disturber of one's instinctual life; he becomes a model not only to imitate but also to get ride of, in order to take his place." (SE 13: 116) "On the contrary, the Arunta seem to be the most highly developed of the Australian tribes and to represent a stage of totemism in dissolution rather than its beginnings. They myths which impressed Frazer so deeply because, in contrast to the conditions that rule to-day, they lay stress upon liberty to eat the totem and to marry within the totem these myths are easily explicable as wishful fantasies which, like the myths of a Golden Age, have been projected back into the past." (SE 13: 118) "The Arunta seem to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism. Their denial of paternity does not appear to rest upon primitive ignorance; in some respects they themselves make use of descent through the

19 19 father. They seem to have sacrificed paternity for the sake of some sort of speculation designed to honor the souls of their ancestors. 2 They have enlarged the myth of the impregnation of a virgin by the spirit into a general theory of conception; but that is no reason why ignorance of the conditions governing fertilization should be imputed to them any more than to the peoples of antiquity at the time of the origin of the Christian myths." 2 'That belief is a philosophy far from primitive.' (Lang, 1905, 192.) Volume 14: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement; Papers on Metapsychology; and, Other Works (SE 14: 36) "In this way analysis not only provided us with the explanation of pathological phenomena, but revealed their connection with normal mental life and disclosed unsuspected relationships between psychiatry and the most various other sciences dealing with activities of the mind. Certain typical dreams, for instance, yielded an explanation of some myths and dreams, for instance, yielded an explanation of some myths and fairy-tales. Riklin [1908] and Abraham [1909] followed this hint and initiated the researches into myths which have found their completion, in a manner complying with even expert standards, in Rank's works on mythology [e.g. 1909, 1911b]. Further investigation into dream-symbolism led to the heart of the problems of mythology, folklore (Jones [e.g and 1912] and Storfer [1914] and the abstractions of religion. A deep impression was made on all hearers at one of the psycho-analytical Congresses when a follower of Jung's demonstrated the correspondence between schizophrenic fantasies and the cosmogonies of primitive times and races 1. Mythological material later received further elaboration (which, though open to criticism, was none the less very interesting) at the hands of Jung, in works attempting to correlate the neuroses with religious and mythological fantasies." 1 [Jan Nelken at the Weimar Congress in An expanded version of the paper will be found in Nelken, 1912.] (SE 14: 81) "This analogy would seem to rule out in advance the possibility of differentiating between interest emanating from erotic sources and from others. Let us remember, further, that the researches of the Swiss school, however valuable, have elucidated only two features in the picture of dementia praecox the presence in it of complexes known to us both in healthy and neurotic subjects, and the similarity of the fantasies that occur in it to popular myths but that they have not been able to throw any further light on the mechanism of the disease. We may repudiate Jung's assertion, then, that the libido theory has come to grief in the attempt to explain dementia praecox, and that it is therefore disposed of for the other neuroses as well."